


C’est La Guerre

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death, Drabble Sequence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Post-Series, Second Chances, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 07:39:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4910935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>War is hell. But life on the home front has to go on, even for the people who are left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. “I’m pregnant.”

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cowalyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cowalyn/gifts).



> These longer-than-drabbles were initially meant to be part of “You Asked For It,” until Cowalyn decided to be evil and blasphemous and request a whole bunch of prompts for what she called ‘Dock’ – that is, Dot/Jack. My initial reaction was to politely decline. ...But then I reconsidered. After all, who am I to turn away from a challenge? 
> 
> This VERY AU sequence also made me break a cardinal rule of mine: ‘I never write major character death.’ Well, now I have, because it was the only way I could make this work. My abject apologies for all the sads. Blame Caro. I’ll go write something happy now.

_December 1931_

“Miss?”

Phryne looked up from her contemplation of the parlour fire. She was curled into a ball in one of the chairs, an untouched cup of tea on the table beside her, and a pale thoughtful expression on her face. “Yes, Dot, dear?”

Dot smiled shyly. “I just wanted to tell you the good news, Miss. It seems I’m expecting again.”

“Again? Already?” Phryne teased. “Little Theo’s barely weaned!” But she opened her arms to hug her companion. “I suppose I shouldn’t be all _that_ surprised,” she continued. “Hugh does seem the type of man to do his duty by his wife.”

Unsurprisingly, Dot blushed at the implication, although not as much as she would have a year or two before. “At least this time we won’t have to worry about getting a nursery in order.”

“Hmm, no. And that’s a very good thing, since that room is going to be seeing some heavy use within the next year.” A wry smile touched Phryne’s lips. “You’re not the only one who seems to be expecting, Dot.”

Dot’s eyes widened. “Miss, you’re—you and the Inspector—?”

“Who else?”

“...Oh Lord. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Oh, don’t look so shocked, Dot,” Phryne grinned. “Yes, I’m pregnant, and yes, it’s Jack’s. Sadly, family planning isn’t entirely foolproof, and ever since we took in Jack’s two orphaned nephews, my reluctant maternal instincts have been getting an _irritatingly_ thorough use. So between them and Theo, at least I have some idea of how to behave.” She rolled her eyes dramatically.

Dot giggled. “In that case, Miss, may I offer my congratulations?”

“You may,” Phryne smiled, her eyes dancing with the reflection of the flames, “and accept mine in return.”


	2. “Please don’t do this.”

_November 1939_

Jack Robinson watched forlornly as Phryne began the final checks on her airplane. “I’m going to ask you one more time,” he said. “Please. Don’t do this.”

Phryne finished making sure that her wing flaps could move freely, and then sighed. “And I’m going to tell you once more time,” she replied, wiping her hands on a rag and pulling her fleece-lined leather flying gloves from her pocket. “I have to. I have my orders.”

There had been no question, when Australia entered the war on the side of Great Britain, that both of them would be involved in the effort in some way. Hugh Collins had already given up his reserved occupation and enlisted in the army, and Dottie, despite being pregnant with her fourth child, was hard at work with all manner of charitable organizations for soldiers abroad. 

But Jack was Superintendent of City South now, and his presence was needed far more at home than abroad, by their teenage nephews and their seven-year-old daughter as much as by the good people of Melbourne. And Phryne was undoubtedly the more cosmopolitan of the two of them, the more well-traveled and the most fluent in foreign languages and by far the most adept at moving amongst all levels of society. So when her orders came, she had to go. 

Jack’s smile was lopsided. “I know.”

“Did you think I’d listen this time?”

“No.” He touched Phryne’s face gently. “You never do.”

Phryne threw her arms around her husband’s neck and hung on tightly. His hands tangled in her silver-streaked black hair. 

“Listen to me this once, Phryne Fisher,” Jack murmured, tears choking his voice. “Just this once: _come back to me._ As you love me—” 

“As I love you.” She kissed him hard, and then softly. Then she removed the blue swallow brooch from her scarf and pressed it into his hand. “For Marguerite. Tell her—”

“I know.” A muscle in Jack’s jaw spasmed, but he made himself smile through it. “She probably won’t sleep until you’re safely home.” He closed his fist carefully around the brooch. “Neither will I.”

He stepped back and saluted her with never-forgotten military precision. “Good luck, Phryne Fisher.”

For the second time, Jack Robinson watched the love of his life fly away. The last he saw of her was a slim hand, obscured by a bulky glove, waving in the distance.


	3. “Well this is awkward…”

_December 1940_

The telegrams came on the same day, one to Wardlow, one to the Collinses’ trim little cottage in Abbotsford. Both began the same way: _REGRET TO INFORM YOU_...

Stunned and numb, Jack paid for both sets of remains to be sent back to Australia. Dot wept as she thanked him, with baby Toby in her arms and toddlers John and Anna clinging to her skirt. In the front garden, eleven-year-old Theo Collins sullenly threw a football back and forth with Jack’s nephews, his schoolmates Ian and Archie Robinson. Upstairs, Marguerite Fisher-Robinson, eight years old and the spitting image of her mother, had barricaded herself in her parents’ bedroom and refused to come out. 

_This is war,_ Jack thought to himself. _This is war._

He dreamed of the trenches that night, for the first time in years. When Marguerite walked in with her doll and found him sitting up in bed and sweating and gasping for breath, she promptly climbed up beside him. “I had a bad dream too, Daddy.”

Jack pulled his daughter close and rocked her to sleep, muffling his tears in her jetty hair. 

Phryne’s funeral was small and private, as her will had requested, for which Jack was profoundly grateful. It would have been like her, he felt, to have her last will and testament predicated on her funeral being the grandest spectacle ever seen. And then he swallowed a sob when he remembered he would never be able to tease her about it. 

Prudence Stanley had passed on some years before, and been laid to rest beside her husband and elder son. Guy Stanley and his family were in England. Dr. MacMillan and Jane were somewhere in Europe, God help them. Henry and Margaret Fisher had been killed in the Blitz. So the only mourners at Phryne Fisher’s funeral were her husband Jack and her daughter, her adopted nephews, the devoted Mr. Butler, and Cec and Bert, and Dottie Collins. 

She came home with them after the service, helped Mr. Butler serve the food Cec and Bert’s wives had brought over in their absence, tucked the exhausted children into bed, and then quietly pushed Jack into a chair in the parlour. She sat down beside him and took his hand, and waited. 

Jack squeezed her hand tightly, and then dissolved into tears. He had held them back since the telegram, for Marguerite and the boys, and now... He sobbed silently, clenching his jaw so tightly the muscles ached later, as thick hot tears rolled down his cheeks. And through it all, Dot sat quietly, like the rock Phryne had always compared her too. 

Two days later, Hugh’s funeral was held in the same church he had been married in eleven years before. The pews were packed and the aisles burst with mourners, with family, with brother police officers, with friends from the football and boxing clubs, with people who had known Hugh as a little boy and as a green police cadet and as a devoted husband and father. It was a fitting memorial to a man who had wanted nothing more than to help people, Jack thought as he sat at the front with Dot and Hugh’s elderly mother. He felt a slim warm hand in his, and knew Phryne agreed with him. 

That night, in the sea-green parlour at Wardlow, while her boys and her little girl slept upstairs with their friends, Dot curled up on the chaise lounge and cried against Jack’s shoulders. 

A week later, on baking day, Jack called on Dot at her home. “What do you plan to do?” he asked, sitting down in her homey kitchen. 

She sighed and wiped her floury hands on her apron. “I’m honestly not sure, Jack.” It had taken ten years of coaxing, but she had finally been convinced to address her husband’s boss by his first name. “The house is paid for, of course, and I’ve got our savings and Hugh’s army and police pensions, but...” She made a gesture that encompassed her home, her children, and the world. 

Jack nodded. “With four kids to raise, it doesn’t go far.”

“I’d go out to work in service again,” Dot said, resuming her kneading, “but Toby’s still nursing, and he’s so delicate, I don’t want to put him on the bottle just yet.” She gnawed on her lower lip. “I’m also thinking of letting the house and going back to my mother’s. But that’s another five mouths for her to feed, and she’s already got Nell and her little girls, ever since Nell’s husband Dan ran off...”

“It’s a fix,” Jack agreed gravely. He drummed his long fingers on the white-scrubbed kitchen table. “I might have a solution.” Dot looked up at once. “Come back to Wardlow. We’ve certainly got room for everyone. Mr. Butler’s getting on in years, and he could use the help. Truth to tell,” Jack added, smiling sadly, “so could I.” 

Dot considered that, her hands never stopping on the soft bread dough as she thought aloud. “If we all moved to Wardlow, I could let this house and the furniture, and between that and Hugh’s pensions, I can keep Theo in school and still have something to put by for the other children.”

“And I’d pay you, of course,” added Jack, sounding rather shocked. 

“Letting us stay with you is payment enough—”

“I insist. I’ve got more money than I’ll ever know what to do with now.” _And Phryne will murder me from beyond the grave if I don’t pay you,_ he thought wryly. “Besides, Marguerite...” He hesitated. “Well, she could stand to have another woman around the house. Or so she tells me.”

That made Dot laugh aloud, and for a moment, as she dropped the loaves of bread into tins and set them aside to rise, the sadness disappeared from around her eyes. “Well, in _that_ case, Jack, I simply can’t refuse.”


	4. “I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice.”

_May 1941_

Christmas got lost among the funerals that year, and the children actually seemed glad when the holidays were over and they had to go back to school. It gave them something to do, to take their minds off their loss. 

Jack missed them. He had gotten into the habit of bringing Ian or Theo or Marguerite to the station with him, to ‘help’ him with his police work. It helped him manage, to have them about. He hoped it helped them as well. 

The younger children stayed home with Dot and Mr. Butler, but invariably one or all of them would tag along with Dot when she came to bring Jack his lunch. “You don’t have to do that,” he told her, the first time she turned up at the front desk with a laden basket on one arm and the other holding tightly to little Anna’s hand. “You’ve got enough on your plate without trucking this mob over here to feed me. I can manage with something from the pie cart.”

Dot had looked at him as though he’d suggested eating one of the children, so Jack wisely shut his mouth and accepted the basket, on condition that she (and the kids) stayed to share. After that it became a daily routine, just as it had been when Hugh had worked the front desk. 

Now even the younger children were in school, leaving only baby Toby for Dot to manage during the day, and Mr. Butler was always more than happy to look after his namesake while Dot brought Jack his midday meal. “It seems strange to be eating alone,” she commented, nibbling thoughtfully on a piece of cold pie, “and not have to worry about keeping John from pocketing bits of evidence or reminding Marguerite not to climb your shelves.”

“Or needing to separate Theo and Archie ten times in as many minutes,” agreed Jack. “Theo’s definitely inherited Hugh’s love of boxing, and he seems to have infected my nephew.”

“Sorry about that. But it’s only fair, since Marguerite has hopelessly corrupted Anna with all of those building sets. I expect to come home some night and find a skyscraper in the parlour.” Dot’s eyes sparkled with wry good humour, and for the first time in a very long time, Jack felt like smiling. 

The smile lingered on his face for a long time after Dot packed up the lunch things and went home, as did the warm fondness in his chest. He’d always liked Dottie, he reminded himself firmly, and refusing to acknowledge the shade of Phryne leaning over his shoulder, silently urging him to admit that it might be more than ‘like’ that he was beginning to feel. 

He was late home that night, as much from reluctance as from paperwork and long interrogations. He liked this new feeling, and he felt incredibly guilty about it, even as he all-too-easily imagined Phryne scolding him. He rather thought she would have wanted him to move on with his life… to find someone else. But he wasn’t ready, not after only six months. He _wasn’t_ ready. And Dottie was the type of woman who had always treasured fidelity. He remembered when another dashing young constable had tried to sweep her away from Hugh, and been gently but firmly turned down with the promise that even if Hugh never came back, her heart would always be his. 

Jack felt that warm glow again, and told himself it was respect for her loyalty.

The house was dark and quiet, so he went round to slip in through the kitchen door. To his surprise, there was a light on. Dot was waiting up for him, hair down and woolly wrapper about her shoulders. “I wanted to make sure you had something decent to eat, before you went to bed,” she explained, and began to heat up the kettle. 

“Thank you, Dot.” He shed his hat and overcoat and dropped into a chair with a soft groan. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned his waistcoat (it was beginning to be thought old-fashioned to wear three-piece suits, but he wasn’t ready to give them up just yet), and watched her move about the kitchen. When she set his tea and his meal before him, he thanked her again and set to eating. 

From beneath his eyelashes, he saw her resume her chair and, as had become her custom, she watched him eat, with one arm on the table and her cheek leaning on her hand. “Penny for your thoughts?” he started to ask, glancing up.

Their eyes met, and Dottie blushed. 

Jack swallowed his mouthful with difficulty, feeling his own cheeks growing hot. 

She bade him goodnight before he finished eating, and slipped away.


	5. “No one needs to know.”

_December 1941_

He was standing at his window, his back to the door and every muscle in his body tense with emotion, when Dot came in with his lunch. She stopped dead in her tracks. “What’s wrong?”

Jack’s jaw and neck were so rigid, he thought they might shatter if he spoke. “I received… information today. Regarding… the man who betrayed Phryne to the Germans.”

Her gloved hands rose to her mouth. “Dear God,” Dot whispered. “Do you know who he is?”

“I know who he is. I know where to find him. I know he’ll be alone. And I haven’t told anyone else.” He turned to face Dot, so that she could see the pistol he held in his hand. 

“Jack… don’t.”

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”

“Because then you’ll be locked up,” said Dot, with the stern firm voice that always seemed so incongruous coming from her sweet face, “and then what will the boys and Marguerite do?”

“They’ve got you. But I won’t be taken. No one will know… and even if they do, no one will care…” The report of Phryne’s death was on his desk, but he had memorized every word, envisioned in his mind’s eye every detail of how her plane had been shot down, and what had happened to her after… “And if they do care… I don’t.”

“But Miss Phryne would.” Dot set the basket on the floor and walked over to him, almost fearlessly, and wrapped her fingers around his wrist. “She’d care very much. She wouldn’t want you to do this, to destroy your life and your little girl’s life. She’d want you to stay as noble as she always knew you were.” Dot bit her lip and looked up into his face. “As I know you still are.” 

“Not always,” was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. 

He turned quietly to his desk, locked the pistol away, and made the necessary arrangements to have the information forwarded to the correct officials. Then folded his arms on his red snakeskin blotter, put his head down, and began to sob. 

Dot quietly poured him tea from the flask in the basket, and tried not to add too many tears of her own to his cup.


	6. “Kiss me.”

_December 1941_

“‘…And they lived happily ever after. The end.’” Jack closed the book with what he hoped was a thoughtful expression, but which was probably just tired. 

His daughter wasn’t fooled. “Did you have a hard day at work today, Daddy?”

That made him smile. At nine years old, Marguerite was perhaps too old for bedtime stories, but little Anna Collins was six and insisted upon a story before bed, and only ‘Uncle Jack’ would do, and since the girls shared a room, Marguerite listened intently every night while pretending to write in her diary. “I did, sweetheart. I had a difficult decision to make.” He sighed and turned to set the book on the table between the girls’ beds. “I hope I made the right choice.”

Marguerite closed her journal with a decisive little thump. “You always do,” she said firmly, brushing a heavy lock of black hair out of her eyes. It hurt Jack to look his child in the eyes now. They were Phryne’s eyes, and whenever he saw them, he thought of the child’s mother watching him from somewhere, watching him and rolling her eyes fondly at his attempts to carry on without her. 

Jack gently pulled the covers up over the sleeping Anna’s shoulders; she always fell asleep half-way through the story, every night without fail. Marguerite held out her arms imperiously. “You forgot my good night kiss last night,” she accused.

“I most certainly did not,” her father retorted, scooping her up and giving her a smacking great kiss on the cheek. 

“I fell asleep waiting for you!”

“I know you did, because I crept in here in the middle of the night, as soon as I got home, to kiss my girl good night.” 

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Promise?”

Jack’s heart clenched. “I promise.” _Just as your mother does, little girl, I’m sure of it._

He pondered that, as he made his slow way downstairs. He had been raised Presbyterian, but had lost most of his sense of faith in the divine somewhere in the mud of France. And he’d never been one to believe in ghosts and the supernatural. But ever since losing Phryne, he hadn’t been able to shake the sense that she was still lingering around him, around Marguerite. 

Maybe it was nothing more than the overactive imagination of a sad middle-aged widower. Maybe it belonged in the same category as those soft warm feelings he’d been nursing for Dottie Collins for the past year: in the realm of fantasy. 

He turned into the parlour for a glass of whiskey and found Dot waiting for him, drink already poured. “Thank you,” he murmured, taking the glass from her and trying not to dwell on the soft brush of her fingers against his. “For this afternoon. I… thank you. For stopping me.”

“Well, I couldn’t let you go off and do such a foolish thing, now could I, Jack Robinson?”

He grinned sheepishly, and then felt ridiculous for smiling. “I, uh… that is… Dot…” He took a fortifying sip and then scrubbed a hand through his graying-brown hair. “I almost ruined my life today, to say nothing of my children’s. And yours. I’m sorry.”

She swallowed and nodded. “At least there’s no harm done.” She looked strangely pale, Jack thought, and he felt a stab of worry. 

“Are you feeling all right?”

Dot bit once or twice at her bottom lip, as she did when she was thinking. She looked down at her folded hands. “When you threatened, today, to go after that man… I felt the way I did when I got the telegram. About Hugh. Like a hole had just been blown through my world. I had to stop you.”

Jack felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He set his glass down and carefully closed the distance between them. Gently, he brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. “I’m very glad you did,” he murmured softly. 

She looked up at him with wide blue eyes, sad and hopeful and beseeching. “Please,” was all she said, reaching to draw his head down to hers.


	7. “Just once.”

_December 1941_

One thing rather led to another, after that…

Jack lay curled around Dot’s small, plump frame, waiting for his heart to resume something like a normal beat. He feared it never would. “Are you all right?” he murmured into her hair. 

She nodded, and traced her fingers lightly down his bicep. “That was… lovely. Just to be held again… I’ve missed him so much.”

“I know… the empty bed is the hardest thing.”

“It is…” She took his hand where it lay on her bare hip and squeezed it tightly. “But… just for tonight, Jack. It wouldn’t be right, us carrying on like this, and me working for you. And the children…”

“I know,” he breathed again, kissing her temple, and then her cheek, and then her throat. “Just tonight…”

It was dawn before she left his bed. The scent of French perfume hung about them both like a benediction.


	8. “I swear it was an accident.”

_January 1942_

A few days before his birthday, Jack slipped round the back of his house after another late night. He wasn’t surprised to find Dot waiting up for him. But his warm greeting died on his lips when he saw that she had been crying. 

“Dot, what on earth’s the matter?” 

She twisted another knot into her handkerchief. “Jack, I never thought when we… I-I think I’m pregnant, Jack.”

For several seconds, Jack couldn’t speak. All he could do was stand there gazing dumbly at her, and remember the night she had spent in his arms, a night of soft warmth and darkness and peaceful, soothing passions. 

“This wasn’t intentional, Jack, I promise you. I wouldn’t have…” Tears began to slip down her face again. “I wasn’t thinking when we… I wasn’t trying to get you to-to make any kind of declarations towards me. I know you’re fond of me, but…” She dashed her wadded-up handkerchief across her eyes. 

“…Wait. You think I’m going to accuse you of trying to trap me into marriage?”

“…Well, that’s what Nell did to Dan, and look how that turned out!” She didn’t wait for Jack to point out that she was nothing like her sister. “Please, Jack, whatever you think of me now, please don’t send us away. I can’t… I can’t manage my kids on my own, with nowhere to live and a new baby on the way…”

Jack felt as though she had just stabbed him. Could she really think he was that kind of man? After all they’d been through together? To just cast her aside, her and the children of his dead friend that he had come to love as his own? And the child she was carrying now? “Dot, Dot...” He framed her face in his hands. “Listen to me. I would _never_ accuse you of that kind of manipulation. And I’m not going to throw you and your children out because of this.” A slight smile touched his lips. “As I recall, I was involved, too.”

“…Oh God,” Dot muttered after a moment, gasping for breath. “I must sound like such a fool… a new baby always does such strange things to my head. But—but I can’t stay here, pregnant and unmarried and stay on as your housekeeper. Jack, what will people think—?”

“They won’t think anything.” He kissed her forehead gently. “Because you won’t be unmarried.”

She stared at him, utterly speechless. “Jack…” Her mouth worked like a fish on a hook as she tried to form words, until finally she managed to squeak out, “Really?”

“Really,” he said, with a sad smile. “And not only because I’ve gotten you into a fix. I just… want to marry you, Dot. I’ve wanted to for some time, but I held back. Out of… loyalty to the dead, I suppose. And I know you’ll always love Hugh, the way I’ll always love Phryne. But what I’ve come to feel for you… is no less profound a love. Even if it is somewhat quieter,” he added, a little wryly. 

That made Dot giggle. “I’m glad of that,” she said. “I’m getting a little old for shouting from the rooftops.”

“I’m a good deal older than you are,” Jack reminded her, his smile widening slightly. “Almost twenty years. Don’t talk to me about you being ‘too old’.” He hesitated. “But I don’t want to assume…” He took her hands in his. “Will you marry me?”

“As if I had a choice,” said Dot simply. Her shining eyes told Jack she wasn’t speaking only of the baby. “I hope the children will all understand.”

“I think they will. And as to the rest of our acquaintance… they won’t think the worse of a widow and a widower with seven children between them, deciding to marry, especially when they’re as old friends as we are.” Jack rubbed the backs of her hands soothingly with his thumbs, and thought he felt Phryne’s hand on his shoulder. “It’s just the war, after all.”


End file.
